Creating grids for tabular matter

…Managing data is one of the trickiest jobs for a designer.…Using grids will help you present tabular matter in a format which makes it…accessible and understandable to your reader, which is always our goal.…Let's look at some good examples of tabular grids.…This list of 500 companies has three statistics, a ranking,…the company name, and a percentage representing a three-year growth rate.…The factors to be considered when establishing the grid were the number of…pages allocated for this list, the number of entries, which was 500,…the length of the longest company name, and legibility factors including point…sizes, type styles, and sufficient space between entries to have clear separation.…

That calculation resulted in a four-column grid.…Notice the light tint bars across every other line.…These help readers with separation.…This grid addresses the process behind the NBA lottery for draft picks.…Each of the 14 teams is ranked by its chances at getting top picks.…The team name and ranking has the widest space allocation.…

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Released

9/22/2014

Simply put, grids are an essential design tool for containing and organizing type and images. But they do so much more. Grids give compositions strength and structure. Grids help break space into units. And grids streamline the visual design process.

Designer Ina Saltz walks you through how to use grids effectively in both print and screen-based projects, offering examples from websites, books, magazines, and even comic strips. Ina touches on using grids to solve issues with hierarchy, proportion, and variation, and points out occasions that might warrant breaking away from the grid, to give your compositions more visual tension and interest. Start here and learn how to add this powerful tool to your typographic arsenal.